Mike's sudden inspirations

Monday, December 9, 2013

Today I realized an important and probably very obvious fact: we all change. Of course, you will say. Surely most of us will agree to that, but the important thing about that is also realizing that we drift away from things we loved. Okay, so what am I actually talking about? :)

I talk about software development, specifically development of and with PHP. We've seen some radical proposals in the nearer past and in deed are still seeing those for PHP, the language. Often, I was inclined to think "cool, that's a great idea, let's improve in that direction."

PHP was and is a huge success, it attracts a lot of awesome people, sometimes becoming unhappy with the language's principles and resulting limitiations, like its simplicity, its forgiving nature and the enigne's effort to come to an end for this request, i.e. to die. Looking at the larger frameworks which have evolved the last few years, they head into a clear direction: strictly object oriented programming with RidiculouslyLongClassNamesLikeFoundInOtherStrictlyObjectOrientedLanguages. Anything non object oriented seems to be verboten. But this is not of what PHP was meant to be and it is very hard to change something that late in the game in such drastical ways. I don't think PHP can change as fast as we do, it's actually much longer around than most of us call ourself programmers.

What I mean to say is, don't be angry with PHP the language, don't force it to change in a way it's not supposed to survive, stop proposing language level changes in a weekly manner, don't be afraid to change yourself. Don't be afraid to advance yourself. Don't be afraid to change the language you program in. BOOM, I said it. Yes, don't be afraid to explore other possibilities that better support your principles instead of fighting them.

I'm not saying go away, I'm saying go ahead, or at least I mean to.

Sorry for the fast write-up, all the typos and errors. Have a nice start into your week!